


Archival

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Series: Freezer Burn [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Drama, Gen, Winter Soldier who?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-17
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-26 20:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/969791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unlike everyone else at SHIELD, Natasha can trace her surprise to the fact that she knows exactly what the Winter Soldier looks like, but she's never heard of James Barnes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Archival

Natasha was not in the habit of defending herself outside of combat, but a point she eventually had to get across after so many accusations veiled as questions, the point that nobody at SHIELD understood, not Clint nor Fury nor the armies of analysts outside of the Russia Desk, was that Captain America and the Howling Commandos had a different mythos and legacy in Russia, in the old Soviet territories, than they did in the West. In the US and the Allied nations, Cap and the Commandos were a team even if Captain America was the sun and the Commandos were the smaller planets orbiting around him and dependent upon him for their existence. The names of the Commandos were known to schoolchildren in the US even now, part of the litany of heroes of a past age along with Eisenhower and Patton and Howard Stark and the rest. James and Gabriel and Timothy were among the most popular names of Baby Boomers and the surviving Commandos had been a part of America's living history and political and cultural present for as long as they'd lived.

But Natasha had learned her history far from the purple mountains' majesty and amber waves of grain and it was not until Steve Rogers's body had been discovered encased in ice that she'd so much as seen a photo of the Howling Commandos, let alone learned what they'd really done during the war. As far as she'd known, the Commandos had been something between a glorified propaganda campaign and a cover story for the actions of a much larger operation. The demographic makeup of the team had been one reason -- dark skin and slanted eyes were just as much a mark of inferiority in Russia even now -- even if the primary one had been to diminish the accomplishments of Captain America.

All of which led up to Natasha staring hard at the photo of Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes when she'd hit the appropriate page of the history book Clint had given her when he'd found out that she'd had no idea who any of the Commandos were.

Clint's professional military career had been largely patterned after the Commandos, he'd explained. Most modern American special operations work could trace its roots back to World War II and the Special Forces in particular were a direct descendant of the Commandos. So her ignorance was more or less equivalent to a family insult -- a slight against his warrior ancestors -- and she'd taken it seriously because _he_ had taken it seriously. The man he'd chosen to become was in honor of these men, although she doubted he'd consider it in those terms. But the woman she'd chosen to become hadn't been in honor of anyone, had instead been in spite of so many, and so she appreciated the difference and respected his reaction.

The photos of Barnes disturbed her because it wasn't just a passing resemblance to Yasha, it was an exact match. She went to the internet and to the SHIELD archives to find more than just the official portrait and the quarter-profile action shot in the history book and what she found did not put her at ease. Quite the opposite. In the photos and interviews and the one clip of video footage she'd watched over and over again, James 'Bucky' Barnes, childhood best friend of Captain America, decorated soldier, ex-HYDRA POW, and the Commandos' designated sniper, hadn't just looked like Yasha, he'd moved and sounded like him, too. Not the Yasha who was the Winter Soldier, the legendary assassin and never-satisfied trainer for the Red Room, although she saw enough of him, too, in the still-classified reports of the Commandos' activities. But the Yasha who'd been her James, who'd shattered her protective shell with gentle hands and a lopsided grin and, for a too-brief time, had brought technicolor to a world she hadn't realized had been black and white.

James. Yaakov Stepanovich Yachmenev, a name he'd been given more or less at random, or so he'd been told. But there had been nothing random about it at all.

The idea that her James could have been Captain America's Bucky was both ludicrous and not. She had no trouble believing the stories that James had been around since World War II -- even if there was no Infinity Formula, she knew too many people who'd been trained by him in the Seventies and Sixties and, most importantly, she'd found him in the stasis chamber two years ago. But that he was actually James Barnes and not someone who'd been conditioned to be like him, that she couldn't prove or disprove. And neither could he if she were to find him and ask him. (Once he'd stopped laughing, of course.) When she'd known him, his memories had gone back to the Blockade of Leningrad, which was before James Barnes had been killed. She'd seen pictures in the archives in Moscow and there were men who'd fought at his side who later worked for the Red Room, so there'd never been any reason to doubt those hazy recollections. James certainly hadn't, had instead held on to them dearly because those memories, he'd said, were all that was left of who he'd been before the Monster Factory had turned him into who he was now.

In hindsight, that revelation whispered in the dark had sown of the seeds of her own defection years later. Transfer orders to Minyar had been the most effective threat the Red Room could make to trainees, but the Winter Soldier, for all of his devastating reputation, had turned out to be remarkably human for a graduate of the Monster Factory. Even before she and he had shattered the boundaries of apprentice and master. He'd been a brutal teacher, unforgiving of his pupils' inexperience and unconcerned by their exhaustion and pain, but he'd also made jokes and his satisfaction with his own incredible abilities had shone through. He'd been someone they'd resented while he was destroying them on the training grounds, yet also someone they'd all aspired to become -- without the train ride to Minyar. But those drowsy words spoken softly into her hair as they'd lay tangled in the sheets and each other had been a sharp reminder that the hero of the Motherland was really just another victim of the war they'd both been conscripted into. A reminder that would become even more pointed too quickly after that night, after their relationship had been discovered and he had been sent back to Minyar to fix whatever part of the Winter Soldier had broken and allowed James to sneak through.

She'd seen him once after that and before she'd fled the Red Room, briefly and in passing, and he'd looked at her with no warmth, no _recognition_ , and she'd tried to pass it off as him being circumspect until she overheard someone else say that it had been overkill to wipe away everything, no matter what the Winter Soldier might've done. The unconcerned response had been that the important parts, the parts that let him kill effortlessly, remained and who the fuck cared if he didn't remember anyone's face because camaraderie wasn't his purpose and he was too important to risk.

But that had been years ago and they were both in the wild now, although Natasha wondered how free Yasha was these days even if he was out of the stasis tank. Maybe no more free than she was, maybe much less, and maybe he wasn't bothered by it whatever his status because the man she'd so briefly known (and maybe loved) was still gone. He wasn't the Winter Soldier anymore in the sense that he wasn't going by that name, was using the Yasha Yachmenev that had been given to him for what could not have possibly been clerical reasons, but he wasn't James, neither hers nor someone else's.


End file.
